Lama Rod Owens has long been fascinated by the relationship between social liberation and ultimate freedom. As an author, activist, and authorized lama in the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, he has worked at the intersection of social change, identity, and spiritual practice, exploring how activist work and spiritual practice can support each other. Recently, he’s been grappling with the question of what freedom looks like in our current political context and how spiritual practice can support us through our current crises.

In his new book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors, Owens draws from the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and Black liberation movements to put forth the notion of the New Saint. “The New Saint is a rethinking of what it means to be a bodhisattva right now, with a particular focus on relative justice and its relationship to ultimate liberation,” he told Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen. “It’s about the contemporary experience of people in a world that seems to be on the edge of catastrophe.”

Shaheen sat down with Owens on a recent episode of Tricycle Talks to discuss why he believes that the apocalypse is an opportunity for awakening, the power of connecting with our ancestors and unseen beings, why the New Saint is not necessarily a good person, and how fierceness can be a form of awakened care. Read an excerpt from their conversation, then listen to the full episode.

You refer to the New Saint’s magic, which depends on two practices: the expression of awakened care and the development of our capacity to disrupt habitual reactivity. Can you walk us through what you mean by awakened care? Awakened care is my experience of bodhicitta. We traditionally define bodhicitta as the awakened heart-mind, but I would say that it’s the magic of the bodhisattva. It’s this view of deep connectedness and deep empathy, where we’re doing the work of liberation not just for ourselves but for all beings. When I am attempting to get free, that labor is also helping others to get free.

Not only do I have to choose freedom, I have to understand that I deserve to be free.

When I began to think about this in terms of the New Saint, I began asking myself, What is my actual felt experience of bodhicitta? The first thing I felt was love, this deep acceptance, holding space for everything and wishing for everyone and everything to be free. I also experienced compassion, tuning into the suffering of both ourselves and the world and actually committing to freeing ourselves and others from suffering. The other piece of this is joy. I feel deep joy for having the capacity to choose to benefit beings through my practice. I’m overwhelmed by that, and there’s deep gratitude in that joy as well. And of course, everything is based in emptiness, so we have the capacity for all of this to happen because of the profound potential of emptiness and space.

When all of this is streamed together, it begins to awaken care, a deep, profound care, the kind of care that says, “I’m going to do everything that I can to get free because I care that much for myself and for others.” An important point here too is that I have to care for myself enough to want to get free to begin with. And a lot of us aren’t there either. Some of us don’t really believe that we deserve to be free from suffering. Not only do I have to choose freedom, I have to understand that I deserve to be free.

You write that awakened care can cause us to lose a sense of agency so that we’re swept up in the agenda of the liberation of all beings and things. So how is it that we surrender to the agenda of liberation? [The author and filmmaker] Toni Cade Bambara has this notion of wanting to make revolution irresistible so that it’s the sweetest, most important thing that we could be doing, and it just becomes what we do and who we are. In awakened care, I’m trying to dissolve the sense of self, and that’s going to bring me into a more direct relationship with the essence or with emptiness itself. In a way, we can describe it as the cultivation of virtue.

When we practice goodness, it becomes a habit, where we’re choosing how to reduce harm moment to moment. We’re just attuned to choosing what will reduce harm. For me, that’s another way that we get swept up: we’re reprogramming ourselves to choose what is conducive to liberation. I want to get lost in that so that everything I do becomes an expression of goodness and therefore an expression of virtue.

One stream of awakened care is love, which you describe as a form of radical acceptance. Can you say more about how you’ve come to understand love? It’s hard to change when you haven’t really told the truth about what’s actually happening, and so the first expression of love is actually allowing ourselves to hold space for everything that’s arising. This is how it is. I don’t have to like it; I just have to name it and notice it.

I think what keeps us from doing that profound radical work of love is heartbreak. When I start telling the truth about how things really are, then my heart is going to break because I have been so concerned with telling myself narratives about how I want things to be in order to feel good about what’s happening. When I let go of that and say, “This is it. This is what’s happening,” my heart breaks, which is the experience of having to touch into this deep disappointment.

Once I start doing that, then there’s an honesty that awakens, and that profound holding becomes love. This is what’s happening, and therefore, I can make a choice to change what needs to change now because I’m not lost in these delusions and narratives about how I think things are; I know how things are. It creates a deeper intimacy with all phenomena and all beings, because you’re with the truth now, and you know that the truth is that everything and everyone deserves to be free.

Another aspect of the work of the New Saint is reclaiming beauty while also disrupting capitalism and overconsumption. So how can beauty help us access the sublime and the transcendent? When I surrender to beauty, I’m letting go of the ways in which I’m protecting and guarding myself. I’m allowing myself to expand, and I’m letting go of the sense of who I think I am, and then beginning to experience and touch into the actual expression of spaciousness. And when I do that, things get more fluid and more inviting. The world becomes less antagonistic, less rigid, less sharp. It becomes more translucent for me when I’m surrendering and opening. And that is the experience of the sublime. That translucent fluidity really is about connecting to this ultimate experience of emptiness itself. But it’s not about materialism. And so instead of accumulating luxury goods that I can’t afford, I connect to the energetic expression of beauty, which feeds a deeper sense of self-worth. That self-worth is about me wanting not to suffer and wanting to actually experience ultimate liberation.

Let’s go a step further and talk about desire. You say that yearning is the first step in touching the divine. How have you learned to work with and channel yearning? You have to want to get free. Desire or yearning is the last thing we give up before ultimate enlightenment. That yearning for enlightenment is going to take us to the threshold, and to go beyond that threshold, we have to let go of wanting to get free, which I think will be a really hard choice to make. But I am training myself to yearn for things that lead to freedom, liberation, fluidity, and movement, not to continue yearning for the things that create rigidity and separateness. And the more I yearn and the more I practice, the more I begin to experience what freedom is, so I know that this is what I should be focusing on: not the rigidity but the experience of getting open and clear and translucent and fluid. That’s it. And so I just start yearning for it. In the same way that we yearn for our bad habits, we can start yearning for experiences of liberation.

The post The Magic of the New Saint appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

During this time of uprising and reckoning, disillusion and disorientation, pain and loss, it’s hard to think of a more relevant voice than Lama Rod Owens’s. 

In his own words, Lama Rod Owens is a “Black, queer, cisgender, and male-identified, fat, mixed-class Buddhist teacher and minister, yoga teacher, and shit-talking Southerner.” He is also a Harvard Divinity School graduate and the co-author of the seminal 2016 book Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation. In 2018, Lama Rod co-founded Bhumisparsha, an inclusive online sangha, with fellow Vajrayana teacher Lama Justin von Budjoss. 

Lama Rod’s new book, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger (June 2020, North Atlantic Books) serves as a guide for transforming our anger with love and grace in a moment when collective calls for freedom are ringing ever more loudly. 

Tricycle spoke with Lama Rod about his new and timely book and how he approaches Buddhist teachings with an activist spirit.   

Your experiences of activism, racial struggle, and queerness play a prominent part in Love and Rage alongside formal knowledge and practice. How did you go about bringing your whole self to this project? I looked at my life and I looked at the way in which the world—and by world I mean people, organizations, family, friends, lovers, and so forth—was always trying to help me to be myself. We’re born into systems, and these systems are informing us; they’re shaping our development. Some of us will die never figuring out who and what we are outside the system. But I tuned into those messages from the world, because I’ve been looking for freedom my whole life. I took small steps [toward liberation], bit by bit. My coming out [as queer] was a major thing. That opened the door wide open. And every few years there’s been a major coming out. 

What are you “coming out” about now? I’m more than just Buddhist. There are other spiritual paths and traditions I’ve trained in that shape how I see the world, including yoga, Hinduism, and plant medicines. (I recently wrote a chapter for the upcoming book Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation and Freedom about my experiences with ayahuasca and plant medicine.) 

Buddhism is definitely my root practice, but I also practice other indigenous, ancestral religions—I consider myself a tantric shaman. For a while, the dharma explained everything, but then I saw that there were things that Buddhism was saying that didn’t line up with certain experiences in my life. 

The theme of what you call “brokenheartedness” and the struggle to survive it runs throughout the book. Can you say more about that? We’ve been running away from our collective heartbreak for centuries and centuries—particularly in this country—and now we’ve reached the breaking point. We have to choose to be embodied; we have to choose to touch into and metabolize that brokenheartedness. That’s going to usher us into a new place. 

Dr. King said, “Riots are the language of the unheard.” I take it further. [Riots are] also the language of people who are hurting and don’t know how to take care of themselves. Energy is popping and exploding, and I think that is an important sign that we must shift into a culture of care, a culture of mourning, and a trauma-informed culture. 

We can’t make this shift if we’re perpetually disembodied. Disembodiment is at the root of body shaming and sex shaming, and it’s at the root of systemic oppression. A majority of the issues we’re facing are due to that lack of touching into the brokenheartedness or our deep feelings of suffering during times of instability.  

Was there a section of the book that was particularly challenging to write? Probably the biggest risk I take in the book is Chapter 8, titled “#MeToo and the Guru.” I think cisgender men have to do more work in the [#MeToo] movement, particularly as we experience the backlash [against teachers accused of abuse]. We have to step forward and talk about how we feed into the system, even if we may consider ourselves the “good guys.” 

Writing that chapter was liberating for me. I wanted to articulate the complexity [between harm and accountability]. I was tired of being told that I had to either bypass [a teacher’s harm] or completely renounce [the teacher]. If you want to do love and rage together, then the love has to hold the complexity. I think Buddhists—particularly dharma practitioners in typically white-dominant communities—enjoy being comfortable and don’t want to deal with complexity. It’s that part of liberal progressive whiteness that says, “I’m afraid to say the wrong thing.” There’s no risk taking.

You write so beautifully about the transhistorical rage around the trauma of enslavement of Africans by white people, the disembodiment that comes out of that trauma, and your own journey to reclaim your body. You recently posted a shirtless image of yourself on Instagram and offered a prayer in the caption: “Dear Beloved, if you are to bless me, it must be in this body or I will need to take a pass.” What did that mean to you? The picture I posted of my body was a big step forward. I used to think, I will never be on social media without my shirt. Now I’ve gotten to a place where I can post this semi-nude picture on Instagram because my body is an offering. I love my body. That love disrupts all the narratives that other people have attached to my body about how I should be ashamed. Or how I’m fat. Or how I’m ugly. While I’ve done a lot of the work myself, I’ve also had transformative moments in relationships, when people have told me, “No, you’re beautiful.” I hold onto those moments; they’re like metta moments, lovingkindness moments, that I tuck away in my memory.

What are other key elements in your spiritual practice right now? Everything I do is about really wanting to get free. I’ve created this structure in my practice where I’m always being pushed forward. Being born in a Black, queer body has made it so that it’s never been easy for me to be comfortable. When I came to dharma, I realized that I could use this discomfort to get free. 

In Love and Rage, many of the practices about working with anger involve invoking a kind of spaciousness. Why is that? It’s because the anger wants to be cared for. Space itself is an expression of the feminine principle, and I am a devotee of the feminine principle, or “the Mother,” which is something I came to through my study of Hinduism. The Mother expresses herself in the forms of female deities, like Tara [a female deity in Tibetan Buddhism], and spreads herself among a wide range of religions, spiritual paths, and traditions. 

In my practice, the Mother offers a spiritual step to instantly becoming anti-capitalistic, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist. When I feel myself contracting and shutting down, I’m getting farther away from the Mother’s spaciousness. A system—such as capitalism, patriarchy, or white-supremacy—isn’t about space; a system is about containment. When we can step back and see everything, that’s when we start experiencing realization and enlightenment. We see the nature of everything because we have the flexibility and the adaptability; we can spread out. 

That’s the heart of the dharma for me. If we don’t have space, we’re not breathing. We can’t breathe without space. And, of course, we know that we can experience that lack of breath physically and we know we can experience that lack of breath socially. 

Right. I’m thinking of protestors yelling, “I can’t breathe.” Experiences of oppression and marginalization, prejudice and discrimination, create this rigid tight contraction that many of us don’t escape from.  

What is the most basic way to practice with anger? First and foremost, I notice the anger. I notice the physical experience, I notice the mental experience. Both the physical and mental experience are talking to one another, pointing to one another. So if I feel something in my body, such as tightness, I know that’s often anger. That points me back to looking at the mental experience. Learning to notice it in the moment: I’m experiencing anger. The basic practice is to say on the spot, I am angry. Then I say, I’m experiencing anger. And that helps me transition to spaciousness. 

The book is Buddhist, but also so deeply queer. I was so happy to see that you included passages about sex work, BDSM, kink, polyamory/nonmonogamy, and fat bodies being sexual, which is often still considered transgressive. People need to be seen. It’s one thing to have this conversation with folks who are in certain scenes, but it’s another to have this conversation within Buddhist spaces. I think there have been attempts to do so in the past, but they’ve been really heteronormative attempts. My intention was to say, “Listen, there’s nothing wrong with how we’re seeking to experience sensual pleasure.” Of course, for me it’s all about seeking consent.  

You quote a line from RuPaul: “I come from a place of love, but sometimes you have to break it down for a motherfucker.” When do you break it down and when do you let it go? When you’ve tried every other way of explaining it, you’ll get to that moment where you break it down through the skillful use of violence. I’m talking about verbal violence—when you have to cuss people out because it’s the only way they’ll hear you. When you “break it down,” you’re actually expressing boundaries. And that’s what we call reading someone: you’ve gotten read, because you haven’t gotten it any other way. If you want to be nice you just throw shade. After that, if shade doesn’t work anymore, then you start reading.  

What’s the next book? I don’t know. I’m always writing. I’m thinking about what it means to be a contemporary bodhisattva. I think that we’re entering into a new age. I’ve been talking to folks—you know, astrologers and people who do readings, mediums—and they are saying that we’re going to see something really significant happen, maybe at the beginning of next year. So I’m thinking about how we can enter into that new period with a new ethic. Currently, the bodhisattva path is taught as just a lofty road to sainthood. And I want to change that.

The post A Love Song to My Anger appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the world of spiritual support and mental health, there has been a big push to offer services online to help people cope with the sudden change and loss spurred by the COVID-19 crisis. Lama Rod Owens is one meditation teacher who has begun offering daily meditations and dharma talks on social media and through his online sangha, Bhumiparsha, which he co-founded in 2018 with Lama Justin von Budjoss. A graduate of the Harvard School of Divinity, Owens is the co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, and the author of the forthcoming Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger. 

Owens also has wisdom to share for those feeling alone at this time. He spent three years “socially distanced” on retreat in upstate New York as part of his training as a lama in the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Tricycle recently sat down with Owens via video conference to talk about how we can work with the challenges and consolations of the pandemic from a tantric perspective.

During your three-year retreat, what did you learn about the effects of solitude on the psyche? Normally, we stay busy and moving and distracted all the time. Now we’re in this period where many people aren’t working; they’re sitting around, and they’re forced to deal with their minds. People might also be struggling with boredom. I had to confront that [reality] strongly on retreat. I learned to give everything space, which is the root of my teaching right now. I [learned to] look at boredom and say, OK, there you are. Same for the pain or the suffering or trauma that came up: OK, there you are. Welcome, and here is a lot of space for you to roam in.

I also experienced a kind of heartbreak. It was an intense period of learning how to have gentleness, patience, and kindness. I learned how to be alone with myself, which meant I had to work through the trauma and the hate and all the ways I struggled to love myself. In order to sit with myself, I had to unpack all the histories and narratives [that affect my life].

You’re saying that there are gifts that come from practicing radical self-acceptance in solitude. Yet that’s not easy. The tantric, or Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, is about doing the hard work while we have the chance—for example, contemplating death and dying [while we’re still alive]. Right now, there is a tremendous amount of heartbreak, trauma, and mourning. This is an apocalyptic moment. The veil has been ripped. We may be seeing capitalism in a different light, or seeing the inconsistencies and lack of care and ability in our governments. We also may be seeing that these systems don’t care about us—so we have to care about each other. In a sense, we are dying, but we’re also preparing to be reborn. That’s what excites me about this—that we have this incredible opportunity to reset and re-emerge into something new. And even though we’re sitting in place in quarantine, we’re changing. The whole world is changing. 

But we didn’t choose to go into lockdown, and that lack of agency can negatively impact what could otherwise be an opportunity. Most people have never trained in quarantine or sheltering in place, and many of us don’t have the skills to work with what it means to be isolated. 

We also may not realize that this is a period in which we are accumulating vast amounts of trauma. When quarantine ends we won’t just transition, we’re going to need to go through a re-acclimation period, and some of us may need mental health therapy during this adjustment. Right now, we’re just trying to deal with the moment. We’re trying to survive, and take care of people, and avoid getting sick, or manage sickness. Because of this, we may not have the capacity to deal with post-pandemic right now or envision a new future. And that’s OK.

You mentioned this pandemic has caused certain people to see our systems of government in a different way—and perhaps made evident the inequity in our systems. How can we support people who are in unfair positions? I’m feeling sort of helpless at home—I have energy to mobilize and want to be a source of support, but I don’t want to cause more harm in my efforts. Exactly. It’s a conundrum for many of us. For me, I have to trust that I can work from the place where I am. Wherever we find ourselves, we have to live there, for now, and do the work that’s been given to us in those locations. When we move out of the pandemic into this post-pandemic space, we can start to do something different. If we are sitting in a lot of privilege, the question may be: How am I going to emerge from this with a new relationship to my resources? How am I going to engage in the work of actually deconstructing a system that has created this kind of hierarchy that I have enjoyed?

As I’ve said before, we’re not all going to make it [through this pandemic]. I hate to use a cliché but, that’s life. And that’s not an excuse—life and what Buddhists call samsara isn’t supposed to be fair. There is suffering here and karma that informs the experiences that we’re having. No one deserves the suffering, but we’ve also contributed to it. We’re not helpless bystanders.

From what I understand of karma, it’s not what happens to us, as much as what we do with what happens to us—which may mean that the appropriate response to today’s grief and loss is a sense of acceptance. And compassion too. We need the compassion for the reality of being human. There has to be a gentleness and kindness and recognition of the basic fundamental discomfort we’re all experiencing. We’re having slightly different experiences, but we’re all moving through this together. For some of us, this may even be an opportunity to rest or have fun—to add new pleasures to our lives. Of course, many of us are still working. Even if you’re working, take an opportunity to add more fun to your day. Figure out what fun feels like for you. What sparks pleasure?

It’s hard to enjoy all this time off when you don’t know when your next paycheck is coming. This is a super anxious period for many because there’s so much insecurity. We have to take that seriously, and find some balance. All along it’s important to contemplate impermanence and death. When we do that, we begin to understand that this is what’s always happening. We’re always in between something. We’re always in and out of the moment. What does it mean to show up to the anxiety, the fear, and the terror in this moment? How can we give that space? We can use whatever tools we have to work with that energy and to come into a different relationship with our lives and with the world. That’s the preciousness of this opportunity.

You posted a beautiful prayer for sustainability on your website where you invoked guides, benefactors, ancestors, and even the Earth. One’s relationship with mentors and deities is an important component of the tantric tradition. How can these mentor beings support us at this time? I think we always need a source of refuge to hold us. We need a belief system that we can rely on to support us through these hard and overwhelming experiences. Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking about what it means to take refuge. I believe that this is a time when the beings of the unseen world are trying to touch into this world to help. But many of us don’t have faith in the belief that we can touch into that realm in a really direct and powerful way—that we can access the wisdom of our ancestors, due to histories of colonization and industrialization that cut us off from these beliefs.

Much of my work is about teaching people how to open up to that source of resiliency, energy, and love. We can feel really helpless and alone and just thrown out into the brutality of the world. And I just don’t think that’s the whole truth of things. I believe there are beings ready to support us and to love us if we just open our minds to that. 

The post Accessing Refuge appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When I started focusing on mindfulness, I realized that it was something I had already been practicing acutely for most of my life. 

Mindfulness has been so much a part of how I have survived as a Black queer man in this world. It is being aware of how people notice me in space, how I can become a suspect by walking into a store—and how I have no choice but to be mindful of the cashiers or plainclothes security. 

The practice, for me, continues to be one of surviving under precarious conditions, where my body becomes a canvas on which other people project a false, and often harmful, reality. To be present to this process is to resist this kind of violence.

Though I have no formal training in mindfulness practices taken directly from the sutras, I have been working with the Satipatthana (Four Foundations of Mindfulness) sutta in my personal practice. It has been a foundational text for me as I continue to understand meditation and what Michel Foucault called “technologies of the self”—the various means through which we can affect personal, mental, and physical changes and produce more happiness, contentment, and wisdom. 

Mindfulness must first emerge from my body as it is in the world, open and sensitive to the many ways it is interpreted by others. Sometimes it shows up in ways that are traumatizing and wounding, and sometimes in ways that celebrate my body.

Now, practicing each day, mindfulness has become a way of being in my body as it breathes, hurts, and rejoices. When I am with other bodies—sharing spaces, communing together, or making love together—mindfulness allows me to show up, fully.

As an authorized lama in the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism, I am trained in Mahamudra (Great Seal), a system of meditation and philosophy that is concerned with revealing the true nature of mind and phenomena. Mahamudra emphasizes shamatha (translated as calm abiding, peaceful abiding, or tranquility) and vipassana (insight) meditation. 

Shamatha is learning to allow the mind to be as thoughts, emotions, and perceptions flow in and out, while insight is the practice of discerning what the mind is by exploring and analyzing phenomena of mind. The initial stages of calm abiding is essentially mindfulness training. This practice provides the stability and concentration needed for insight meditation.

Shamatha is a doorway into noticing and learning to be in relationship to our bodies. We focus on the breath, using the physical sensation to anchor our attention. When I practice shamatha, I begin by simply noticing that I have a body. This is an important first step before I move on to noticing the sensations of my body. For anyone who manages any level of body trauma, acknowledging the body may be as close as they can get to noticing physical sensations. However, just knowing you have a body is still an important practice.  

How to Practice Shamatha Meditation

The purpose of shamatha meditation is to stabilize the mind by cultivating a steady awareness of the object of meditation. Shamatha is traditionally practiced using different kinds of supports or anchors, but eventually the practitioner lets go of those supports and begins meditating on emptiness itself with an open awareness. Here, the instructions will focus on the breath. 

Shamatha meditation allows us to experience our mind as it is. We learn to see that our mind is full of thoughts, some conducive to our happiness and further realization, and others not. It is important to understand that having so much happening in the mind is not extraordinary but natural. 

Over time, shamatha helps us calmly abide with our thoughts and emotions as they are. We experience tranquility of mind and our unhelpful thoughts decrease.

When we experience stable awareness, we are then ready to practice vipassana, in which we develop insight into what “mind” is. In the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism, the goal is to practice calm abiding and insight in union and, ultimately, realize the true nature of mind.

The Seven-Point Posture

Shamatha instructions begins by looking at the physical body. The seven-point posture of Vairocana [the cosmic buddha] is an ancient set of posture points that are said to align the physical body with our energetic body. The posture has been practiced for thousands of years by Hindu and Buddhist yogis. The seven points are:

1. Sit cross-legged.
2. Hands in lap or on knees.
3. Have a straight back.
4. Widen the shoulders to open the heart center.
5. Lower the chin.
6. Open mouth slightly with the tongue resting on the roof of the mouth.
7. Eyes open, gazing about four finger widths past the tip of nose.

A Body-Sensitive Posture

We all have different bodies and capabilities. It is important to adjust this demanding traditional posture to meet the needs of our own bodies, and not struggle to adapt our bodies to the posture. What is most important in terms of body posture is keeping the back and spine as straight as possible and remaining comfortable. So the seven points of a more body-sensitive posture could be:

1. Sit on a cushion or a chair, stand, or lie down.
2. Arrange your hands in any way that is comfortable.
3. Hold your back as straight as possible.
4. Keep your shoulders relaxed and chest open.
5. Hold your head at whatever level is comfortable.
6. Keep your lower jaw slightly open.
7. Keep the eyes closed or open.

The Breath

There are many kinds of breath meditations. Some have been written down, while others have only been transmitted orally from teacher to student. The following is a basic breath meditation from the Vajrayana tradition:

After adjusting the body into a comfortable position, start becoming aware of your breath. Notice the inhalation and exhalation.

As you focus on the breath, let go of any thoughts that arise. Each time you are distracted by or start clinging to a thought, return to the breath. Continue doing this over and over again.

Eventually, as you exhale, start to become aware of your breath escaping and dissolving into space. Experience the same thing with the inhalation.

Slowing down, begin to allow your awareness to mix into open space with the breath on both the inhale and exhale.

To deepen the practice, inhale and hold the breath for a few seconds before exhaling. By doing this, you are splitting the breath into three parts: inhalation, holding, and exhalation. Keep doing this.

As you inhale, begin to chant om to yourself. As you hold, chant ah. As you exhale, chant hung. Chanting these sacred syllables helps to further support awareness and is believed to purify our minds.

As you continue with exhalation, relax more. Continue awareness practice, letting go of thoughts and returning to the breath, for as long as you can.

The post The Shamatha of Survival appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We live in difficult times. War and violence, racism and hatred, and socioeconomic and environmental concerns have left many of us fatigued and fearful. What practices and strategies can we summon from the dharma to aid us in facing the chaos of the world? In this series of talks, Tibetan Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owens draws on the Buddhist teachings to help us enact an ethic of healing, especially as activists or allies of such movements as Black Lives Matter or gay marriage, so that we can live boldly instead of lashing out or shutting down.

The post Compassion, Love, and Healing in Times of War appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Creativity isn’t confined to just our heads. For Lama Rod Owens, body concentration is a prompt that helps him write poetry and tap into instinct. 

In the following video Owens, who is a teacher in the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism, guides you through a physical writing exercise that draws on meditation and mindfulness of the body to “generate verse” and perhaps find an underlying narrative that you haven’t explored before.  

You’ll also hear Owens read two poems he wrote while on a three-year retreat at Kagyu Thubten Choling Monastery in upstate New York, and he’ll talk about the important role of poetry in his own life and practice.

“One of the things that really motivates me as an artist, as a poet, is this challenge and struggle to bring awareness to things that are so often considered ordinary or underwhelming,” Owens says in the video. “I think it is my personal effort to make the world more relevant . . . my poetry is an extension of that work.”

Learn more about Lama Rod in this Harvard interview

Watch more Tricycle Poetry Month videos:

Week 1: Zen, Poetry, and Not Thinking with Dick Allen

Week 2: Using Poetry to Work Through Difficult Emotions with Teresa Mei Chuc

The post Poetry Month Week 3: Writing from the Core appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.